


As is his wont, billionaire playboy industrialist, Bond villain come-to-life and sad dad Elon Musk put on quite the show last night when he unveiled Tesla's Class 8 Semi truck and new high-speed Roadster.

By introducing the world to his newest world-changing toy, a semi that can go 500 miles on a single charge potentially redefining the economics of land freight, Elon attempted to reignite the faith of the lately moribund Tesla faithful. In fact, Elon even dipped into some teachings from the Book of Jobs, pulling out a "One more thing" and surprising everyone with what Tesla is foundationally built upon: a sexy new electric sports car.

It was a double-barrel shot at getting Tesla back in the game!

And it almost worked:

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There was time when introducing a new product would have sent Tesla's stock skyrocketing like one of Elon's actual space rockets. But that was like weeks ago.

It's become pretty clear that Musk's push to mass produce the Model 3 is now considered an objective failure, and created a real schism in the religion that is Tesla. Bloomberg has a nice roundup of analyst notes that think the truck is cool, but also wonder aloud if Elon is just overpromising again, an increasingly certain indicator that he's about to underdeliver.

And it's also been made pretty clear that Elon is more distracted than ever. Between saving Puerto Rico, moving forward with SpaceX, Hyperloop and his all-consuming yearning to find love, Musk is obviously not 110% focused on making cars. That's not good for the stock price.

Even full-time Elon acolyte, part-time Morgan Stanley analyst Adam Jonas is having a hard time getting it up for the realistic impact of the Semi. After dramatically writing that "A new age of trucking begins today," Jonas concludes "While we see Tesla Semi as a natural market adjacency to the personal transport model, we struggle seeing it worth more than 10% of the current market cap."

Basically, Tesla bulls are still dying to believe in the prophet's newest creations, they just need to see these miracle mass produced to truly return to the flock.